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Why are some companies more successful than others?
The real life laboratory
Undoubtedly, strategy is important and it is described in the management literature, in management consulting, and in practical stewardship in private and public companies. Invariably, an aspiration for the adoption of the ‘right’ strategy prevails.
However, is it true that there is such a thing as the one and only best strategy for a company? Is the market leader of today the industry winner of tomorrow? Is it possible to create sustainable competitive advantage simply by way of adopting a generic strategy? Can you, generally, craft a strategy to create uncontested market space and thereby make the competition irrelevant?
In a world constantly in search of rationalism, it would be nice, if we were able to give the straightforward answer ‘yes’.
However, we think that the answer to each question is probably ‘no’. When we say probably it is because you should never exclude the possibility that new empirical findings could lead to new insights.
Over the past two decades alone, strategic analyses and books searching for the keys to high performance have included In Search of Excellence published in 1982 [1], Corporate Culture and Performance from 1992 [2], Build to Last from 1994 [3], through to the more recent Good to Great [4], What Really Works [5] and Blue Ocean Strategy [6] published in 2001, 2003 and 2005 respectively. The question within strategic management remains the same, namely ‘What is the most successful strategy?’ But the answers offered in the literature appear to be many and varied.
Michael Porter’s conventional wisdom from the early 80s recommends that you should choose between a differentiator type of strategy or become a cost leader. In recent strategic literature Kim and Mauborgne in Blue Ocean Strategy [6] tell you to create uncontested market space and simply make the competition irrelevant. In What Really Works [5], Joyce, Nohria and Roberson develop a model known as the 4+2 model as a recipe for success. This model is based on a thorough analysis and argues that focus on four key areas coupled with an additional two areas chosen from a possible four should lead to superior performance.
One of the problems with many of the normative strategy schools is that they cannot adequately explain why winners emerge in hypercompetitive markets. On the one hand, it is about creating superior value and, on the the other, it might be about developing value destruction. However, the notion of value destruction is explored less as a consequence of a strategy aiming to create value. Surely, many are familiar with creative destruction as described by Schumpeter [7] but what if the value destruction doesn’t stem from new and improved technology or products alone but also from new and different strategies?
All industries may then be at risk in terms of the potential value destruction lurking in an unknown future. This risk, or opportunity, is precisely the reason for this book and its focus on exploring why some companies are more successful than others. Or rather why some companies successfully bridge the gap between differentiator and cost leader type of strategies and emerge as winners in hypercompetitive markets and what this entails in terms of value destruction and creation.
Creating value and simultaneous destruction
The majority of managers think in traditional terms in which a product is produced at a cost and sold at a margin. This approach is regarded as creating value for the customer in some sense and value for the owner or shareholder to take home. This rather simple concept of business is expressed by the founder of the Body Shop Anita Roddick who states that [8]:
Business is not financial science, it’s about trading . . . buying and selling. It’s about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it.
Now what about creating a product or service, which is good enough for people to use but is free of charge? Is that good business sense, financial science or just plain lunacy? Some would cry out ‘madness’ while others such as the two founders of Skype, would describe it as good business sense. Such good sense that it has resulted in the sale of Skype to eBay for US$ 2.6 billion only three years after the first user downloaded the Skype software from the Internet.
When pondering what eBay has actually purchased, the immediate answer that it has bought an IP telephone operator appears to be far from the truth as it has bought a company which can provide an added benefit for the users of eBay. As such, Skype is viewed by eBay as an extension of its existing business by extending the Internet infrastructure of eBay with IP telephony. This means that the customers can not only communicate by e-mail but they can also speak to each other at a very competitive rate!
Regardless of eBay’s intentions, US$ 2.6 billion has been created for the shareholders of Skype over the past three years along with an overwhelming potential for value destruction across the entire industry of telephone communications. The usage per minute charges of the traditional telecommunications industry are seriously at risk from the free telephony offered to users of Skype who are calling other Skype users.
One reason for this value destruction is technological development and the fact that many Internet connections can support telephony. It is, however, not the only reason as the possibility of Internet telephony has been known for a long time and has been attempted by others. So what is the secret behind the huge success of Skype?
Clear focus and exceptional execution of a discount strategy can be argued to be the main reasons for Skype’s success as opposed to, e.g. proprietary technology. A discount strategy of such magnitude may alter the nature of the telecommunications industry. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is in fact convinced that not only will Skype change the industry but also the world of communications (Fortune Magazine, February 16, 2004):
I knew it was over when I downloaded Skype, Michael Powell, chairman, Federal Communications Commission, explained. When the inventors of KaZaA are distributing for free a little program that you can use to talk to anybody else, and the quality is fantastic, and it’s free-it’s over. The world will change now inevitably.
The founders of Skype had little doubt that the telecommunications industry was about to change and that a value destruction across the traditional providers would be a result of this, as the following quote from Niklas Zennstöm, CEO and co-founder of Skype, shows clearly:
The idea of charging for calls belongs to the last century. Skype software gives people new power to affordably stay in touch with their friends and family by taking advantage of their technology and connectivity investments.
There is little doubt that technological developments acted as a catalyst for Skype but other more traditional industries have also been exposed to companies who turn things upside down. Companies who create value for themselves while developing the destruction of value for others.
IKEA is one of the more traditional companies which have changed the industry and signalled value destruction for the traditional furniture manufacturers operating in the 1970’s. However, this was not due to technological innovation but merely a result of a vision and a strategy devised by the now legendary founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad [9].
We shall offer a wide range of home furnishing items of good design and function at prices so low that the majority of people can afford to buy them . . . We have great ambitions.
The value created for IKEA and the value destruction this entailed for its competitors was not due to technical innovation but merely to a different way of approaching the market. Is there anything in common between these two companies that can be identified as key factors for their success? Judging by the amount of daily Skype downloads, and the vision of Ingvar Kamprad, volume appears to hold some significance.
The volume game
As not all companies can create value through offering a product or service free of charge, they seek to price it low and make up for this lower margin through volume.
When IKEA opened near Munich in 1974, West Germany was Europe’s largest market as well as the largest producer and exporter of furniture. At that time the German furniture retail industry consisted of retailers who were using show-rooms, taking orders from manufacturers which resulted in limited inventories leading to long delivery times. IKEA did it differently. They promised low prices, immediate delivery and Swedish quality and 37,000 people visited the store during the first three days.
Despite vigorous responses from German retailers, IKEA and their low cost concept were there to stay and by the late 1970’s they had captured a 50 % share of the West German cash-and-carry segment. Today IKEA has locations from Iceland to Kuwait covering all continents, their catalogue has been printed in more copies than the Bible and endless hordes of people are passing through their stores on a daily basis.
The American company Costco is another company which has been instrumental in reshaping the retail industry and looking for high volumes rather than high margins. With a company policy stating that the mark-up of goods may not rise above 14 %, high volumes have been essential in recording annual net sales of more than US$ 40 billion [10].
The sheer size of this volume is further emphasized by the fact that one in four American households holds a membership of Costco [11]. The combination of such volume and the ceiling on mark-ups has had serious consequences for the retail industry as a whole as Costco may not only be cheaper but also reaches a phenomenal number of customers. This customer base has been achieved over the past two decades by breaking the traditional mold of not only retailing but also of strategy making in general.
Volume is the essence of Skype and its impact is not in doubt but the increase in number of downloads since the first software was made available to the public is astounding. Since day one, Skype has maintained its rate of downloads resulting in more than 200 million people who have downloaded the Skype software up to 2005. Looking solely at the American market, research shows that Skype accounts for a large percentage of the IP current telephony (analysis done by broadband management company Sandvine Inc):
Calls using Skype Technologies SA account for nearly half of the VOIP minutes used (46.2 percent) and about 40 percent of the VOIP bandwidth used in North America.
In addition to the above it should be noted that Skype achieved one billion minutes of Skype-to-Skype usage in 2004, one year after they made their downloadable software available. In 2005 this figure had climbed to 10 billion Skype-to-Skype minutes which, when illustrated in Figure 1.1, shows an astonishing trend.
Figure 1.1 Skype minutes of usage
If this trend continues the question becomes whether Skype will reach 100 billion in 2006? Imagine that: 100 billion minutes of free Skype-to-Skype minutes which were previously offered by traditional telecommunications companies at a monopolistic charge. Even if that charge, on average, is assumed to be as low as US$0.01, Skype would be causing a value destruction of US$ 1 billion due to high volume.
By comparison, AT&T Communication and MCI WorldCom each recorded approximately 20 billion minutes of international...
